Book Review: Empire Of the Sun by J.G. Ballard

Book Review

Empire Of the Sun by J.G. Ballard

     Reading J.G. Ballard’s Empire Of the Sun can be a challenge. This is testament to its power as a novel and not at all a criticism. The heavy and depressing subject matter, the graphic descriptions of the dead and dying, and the surreal but bleak psychological tone could make a faint-hearted reader give up before finishing. However, if the young protagonist of the story can survive his miserable ordeal, why can’t you, the well-fed reader, sitting in the safety and comfort of your own home, at least put up with it before going back to your warm bed and kitchen stocked with food, some of which will be thrown away for not being eaten by the expiration date on the packaging?

As the story starts, Jim is an eleven year old English boy, born and raised in Shanghai because his father is a wealthy businessman. A live-in nanny named Vera, while watching over him, tells him that not everyone has it as well as he does. Vera is a Jewish refugee from Poland and her poignant statement resonates ironically throughout the story. As Jim’s journey into World War II progresses, it becomes clear that he does not have it as well as he could but despite his nightmarish existence, he still has it better than most of the other people he encounters.

     In the first third if the novel, Jim has a revelation when he sits in a defunct bomber he finds while exploring an abandoned airport in Shanghai. He spots it while playing with a toy balsa-wood airplane and the bridge between him and aviation, play and reality, childhood and adolescence are all established. As he sits in the airplane, thinking about his future, a platoon of Japanese soldiers stands nearby; his father comes and takes him away before they approach and a link between his family and the Japanese military is also established in preparation for Jim’s psychological development later in the book. In a narrative reversed foreshadowing, Jim’s father takes control of him while the Japanese military becomes Jim’s guardian later with the airplane being the centerpiece between the two.

     Jim and his parents wake up the next morning and watch from a hotel room on the Bund as Japanese invaders take control over the waterfront in an attack on the two American ships stationed there. In the ensuing chaos, he loses his parents and ends up wandering alone throughout the abandoned houses of Shanghai, searching for them while surviving on scraps of left-behind food. Details like the swimming pool drained and full of garbage heighten the sense of his family’s absence. The thoughts that the war will soon end and he will be reunited with his parents become powerful psychological mechanisms that help Jim to persist in surviving as the plot advances. The void of parental authority in his life is another theme that enters at this point. Then Jim meets up with Basie, an effeminate American thief who hopes to profit from the war by collecting items left behind by people as they get taken away to internment camps. He tries to sell Jim at the market and when he fails, they develop an ambiguous relationship. Basie is the oddest character in the book and he keeps reappearing throughout.

     Jim gets captured by the Japanese soldiers and gets sent by truck to Lunghua internment camp on the outskirts of Shanghai. The trip out there is harrowing; the other passengers are weak and close to death as they pass out on the floor of the truck bed in pools of vomit, blood, and urine. Jim befriends another key character, Dr. Ransome. Other themes are introduced here too since the Japanese driver, new to Shanghai and fresh off the boat from Japan, does not know how to find the prison camp; Jim helps him find his way since his parents had taken him to parties at the resort located next to Lunghua and he knows exactly where it is. Jim here established himself as possibly the smartest person in the book and one who has a greater chance of survival because he makes himself useful to everyone around him.

     The second section fast-forwards three years into Jim’s life at Lunghua. Living conditions are starting to get worse as the Japanese start losing the war and food rations get cut. Jim, the growing fourteen year old teenager, grasps for bits of parental guidance wherever he can find them. One way he does this is by identifying with the authority figures of the Japanese military who run the internment camp. Despite their cruelty, they do provide food, shelter, and a certain type of parental discipline. The British prisoners at Lunghua act like cowardly, petty, and mean. In his confused mind, he begins to admire the Japanese for their courage. The thief Basie, also imprisoned there, teaches Jim survival skills and gives him some illicit jobs to do in exchange for food and access to his collection of Reader’s Digest magazines. Basie rations these items to Jim to control him but Jim may be simultaneously learning how to manipulate Basie. Dr. Ransome helps Jim with schoolwork, teaching him Latin and trigonometry but when Jim suggests teaching the Japanese trigonometry so they can use airplane shadows to calculate where their bombs will fall during air-raids, Dr. Ransome decides to replace those lessons with algebra instead. At this point, Jim has become an amoral pragmatist; this is not a failure on his part. It is a psychological adjustment that increases his chances of survival. (Nietzsche or Foucault might interject here to say that complex systems of morality are tools of domination devised in societies that have progressed to where mere survival is taken for granted).

     The Japanese soldiers, Basie, and Dr. Ransome, among others, all serve as surrogate parental figures to Jim. Still, a huge void where his mother and father used to be has never been completely filled. One of the ways he compensates for this loss is by taking a deep and active interest in aviation. Jim plasters his walls with pictures of bombers cut out from magazines. He learns the names of all the airplanes being used in the war and since Lunghua is located next to a landing strip, Jim gets firsthand views of American air raids, being impressed by the sleek and superior machinery of the US fleet. He continues to admire the Japanese fliers though, describing the wings of a Japanese airplane as being the strong and protective arms of his mother.

     Another psychological development occurs in Jim’s character during this time at Lunghua internment camp. He learns to accept his place in the world and even, in some ways, thrives despite his awful diet of gruel, weevils, and rancid sweet potatoes served once a day. His chances of survival increase because he does not succumb to the misery and hopelessness of the other other prisoners, many of which might have died because they desired a better life rather than finding freedom where they were. Not everyone’s life is as good as his. Jim identifies deeply with the prison camp and in some ways, possibly lapsing into delusion due to illness and being malnourished, feeling as if he were responsible for its success.

     In the final section of Empire Of the Sun, the prisoners are led out of the camp on a death march. They stop in a sports stadium where the stronger prisoners are separated and taken out to be shot. Jim escapes this fate by pretending to be dead. While sleeping in the stadium pitch early in the morning, he sees several flashes in the sky. Jim later learns that these were from the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and World War II has ended with the surrender of the Japanese. Jim begins wandering back to Lunghua. The land, canals, and paddies are strewn with rotting corpses and derelict airplanes. Jim survives by eating rations dropped by American airforce pilots. His thinking becomes erratic and delusional; at one point Jim believes he can resurrect people from the dead by placing pieces of spam in their mouths. The last section also has no shortage of disgusting imagery.

     Empire Of the Sun is a story of survival but it is not a sentimental novel about optimism and the strength to triumph against all odds. Nor is it about the strong trampling over the weak; jim is so sick and famished he sometimes can not even stand up and walk. It is more like a grim and misantrhopic commentary on how terrible human beings can be. Jim does not survive because he is an unfailing optimist; he survives because he is selfish enough to see how every opportunity can be used to keep himself going. He helps people for the sake of benefiting himself. The other prisoners are not any more moral than he is and the Japanese and Chinese characters in the story are nothing but outright cruel. There is little psychological comfort to be found in these pages, not even at the end. What makes Jim so strong in the end is not just his amorality; he takes active interest in everything around him, has an insatiable curiosity, and desires to live life to the fullest even when that means flourishing in hell. Jim is the ultimate stoic. His survival is not merely physical since it involves the mental acuity of this emaciated boy to find an advantage in any situation no matter how grotesque or disturbing it might be.

     Finally, it is a mistake to read Empire Of the Sun as an autobiography or memoir. While it is based on J.G. Ballard’s real childhood in a Shanghai internment camp, it is altered, embellished, and refined to make it a truly Ballardian novel. It has many echoes of themes, imagery, dark humor, and elements presented in other works like Concrete Island, High Rise, and The Wind from Nowhere. But Empire Of the Sun probably represents J.G. Ballard’s artistic and commercial peak. If you keep his other works in mind and read it as a surrealist novel, you might get a lot more out of it than just interpreting it as a simple war and survival story.

Ballard, J.G. Empire Of the Sun. Washington Square Press, New York: 1985